Lawyers for the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, Ohio’s largest charter school and one of the nation’s largest e-schools, has employed a new tactic to protect the school’s collection of tax dollars for phantom students. Jim Siegel and Catherine Candisky of The Columbus Dispatchreport that ECOT has filed a lawsuit to block an attendance audit to be conducted this week by the Ohio Department of Education:

“Facing the potential loss of tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding, Ohio’s largest online charter school sued the state Friday in an attempt to block an upcoming attendance audit. The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow filed the lawsuit in an attempt to stop the Ohio Department of Education from requiring that the school provide records of daily student log-in times, which the lawsuit calls ‘a bait and switch.’ The state’s preliminary attendance review of ECOT in May raised questions, noting that ‘most log-in times from these files did not substantiate 5 hours per day of log-in time for the students reviewed. The accuracy of attendance figures is crucial because they are the key factor in determining how much state money a school receives. ECOT gets about $107 million per year for more than 15,000 students.” The Ohio Department of Education had scheduled a final ECOT attendance review this week.

Neil Clark, ECOT’s “consultant” and one of Columbus’ best known and most powerful Republican lobbyists, explained on Friday that ECOT signed a funding agreement with the Ohio Department of Education back in 2003. Clark says the 2003 contract requires only that that ECOT offer each of its students 920 hours of “learning opportunities” in every school year but does not require students actually to participate for five hours every day—all 920 hours.

The Plain Dealer reprinted and expanded the Dispatch story on page A14 in its Saturday, print edition, but a hotlink is unavailable because cleveland.com, the newspaper’s website, did not pick up the story. The Plain Dealer‘s story provides additional information from the lawsuit itself, in which ECOT alleges: “The General Assembly elected to make this FTE (full time equivalency) calculation dependent upon the number of hours of learning opportunities offered, as opposed to actual time spent logged in by a particular student… Simply put, had the legislature intended to make FTE funding dependent on student log-in time/duration or some other measure of ‘participation,’ it knew exactly how to do so. Instead it specifically chose to make the (attendance) funding calculation based on learning opportunities ‘offered’ by Ohio’s community schools.” (In Ohio law, charters are termed “community schools,” unlike the rest of the country where “Community Schools” are defined as traditional public schools with added wraparound health and social services located right in the school building.)

Describing the lawsuit’s contention that a 2003 contract agreement with the Ohio Department of Education merely requires ECOT to provide 920 hours of curriculum but does not require that students actually participate, the Plain Dealer report adds: “The agreement was signed by an associate superintendent at the Education Department but his or her signature is illegible.”